In Portuguese (also in Spanish and in Basque) "sapo"
initially indicated a specific kind of toad ( Bufo bufo,
from the Anura order and Bufonidae family),
but the etymology of the word has been lost. In all our fairy-tales
"sapo" refers to the toad. There's certainly no relation to Sappho (inspite
of the alluring breasts which emerged in the associations linked to VN).
You exemplified your secondary employ of frog (i.e:questions)
after the direct reference to the insult addressed at the French. You
number (2) frog is most interesting: what links the English
linguist in Nice and the theme of seagulls/cigales in connection
to La Fontaine's fable about the "La Cigale et la Fourmi." Aside from
the obvious mention of "cigales," there's a veiled protuberance (CK's
notes on Queen Victoria's shrouded unicorn) and, of course, the equally
subreptitions emergent "fountain" in the fabulist's name (La Fontaine,
Lafontaine: The Fountain), who Kinbote's contradicts with his quip about "dead the mandible, alive the song," since in the original
fable the individual cicada dies together with the immortal
song of its species, while the busy silent ant lives
on.
................................................................................................
* A.Stadlen: "The bizarre
-- even Nabokovian -- thing is that some years ago, in an effort to identify the
young patient whom Freud mentions in his letters to Fliess, I
inspected hotel registers, cure-lists, etc. I also asked the staff and
proprietors of a number of Interlaken hotels whether I might view any
lavatories installed at the time in question from which one might, in however
contorted a position, observe the Jungfrau. These good people assured me
politely -- without any hint of a suggestion that my request was an odd one
-- that, in the late nineteenth century, while every hotel was built with
its best rooms facing the Jungfrau, the lavatories were all at the rear of the
building, thus affording no possibility whatever of glimpsing that
mountain. In the end, another historian of psychoanalysis (Peter Swales), after
much inconclusive research by both of us, identified the young patient
(Oskar Fellner) from an archive in Vienna".
A query concerning a recent quote from "Lolita":
"... glorious diamond peak upon peak, giant conifers,
le montagnard émigré in his bear skin glory..." Who
is HH(VN) indicating as a "montagnard émigré" from the perspective of a
childhood fascination?
** - btw: In a psychoanalytic session
"blancmangé breasts, mandibles, fountains, mountains, erections and a
Queen's veiled phallus" might be particularly meaningful. In literature we
have 'only words to play with' when the intention is to imitate a
truly psychoanalytic interpretation.
As in the poet's words: But in the case/ Of my
white fountain what it did replace/ Perceptually was something that, I
felt,/Could be grasped only by whoever dwelt/ In the strange world where I was a mere stray. (curiously, Lacan describes the analyst's position as
the "place of the dead" - but that's a different story
altogether!)